Optimizing 'Hungry Babies' for Unity

When we rebuilt our match-3 game in Unity, I was tasked with handling the large backlog of art assets. I implemented new processes improve the pipeline for future content updates, as well as optimize existing assets to use fewer resources and improve performance.

World Map

The world map portion of the game contained some of the largest images in the project. I found that I could combine all of these images into a single atlas that was the size of the largest individual image.

Auto-Sprite Generation

I added a section to our asset processor script to automatically generate sprites at the size and position defined in the style guide, and name them appropriately. These are then ready to use in the new world map prefab.

This tool was built in a flexible way that allowed other game teams to implement it into their pipeline as well.

'Gopher Kid' Animation Texture Atlas

In the previous game engine, we used individual images per character animation. One of these characters, the 'gopher kid', used one atlas per each of the seven color variations. This caused each color to be on its own draw call. I was able to combine all seven colors into one texture atlas that was half the size of a single original atlas. The size of the asset in-game did not need such a large source asset.